1. “China’s Threat to the U.S. Is Exaggerated
Furthermore, the U.S. military deploys far forward around China; China’s general military forces do not deploy in the Western Hemisphere and do not threaten the United States. The most important finding in the Pentagon’s report was that China could not deploy and sustain even small military units far away from its borders before 2015. The report continued that China would not be able to deploy and sustain large units in combat far away from China until well into the decade after that. Instead, the Pentagon concluded that China is modernizing its military for short conflicts around its borders. In other words, China’s capability to project conventional power is and will remain pathetic far into the future — thus making most of China’s neighbors relatively safe, and the faraway U.S. very safe, against a Chinese attack.
But what about Taiwan? Right now it is doubtful that China could conduct a successful amphibious invasion against Taiwan, which is an island. Island nations are easier to defend than other countries, because amphibious landings are one of the most difficult military operations to undertake. In Taiwan’s case, it has a very good air force that could probably sink any Chinese amphibious force, because Chinese ships are deficient in good air defenses. The greatest threat to Taiwan would be Chinese intimidation or actual attack with a growing number of short-range ballistic missiles.
But the real question is whether Taiwan is strategic militarily to the United States. The small island nation is not, and the United States shouldn’t risk escalation with a nuclear-armed China to defend it. Even as the Chinese military gets stronger, the rich Taiwanese can use a porcupine strategy. They don’t have to be able to win a war with China; they just need to be able to inflict enough damage to dissuade China from invading or attacking.
…
Therefore, the United States should declare that it will no longer defend Taiwan and retract the American Navy’s threat to China from U.S. forward bases and deployments in East Asia. Now that the Cold War is long over, these forward forces are not needed for U.S. security and are needlessly provocative to China. Such deployments and bases, and the U.S. containment policy toward China, contribute to the perceived Chinese need for double-digit defense budget increases. Thus, in a time of world economic meltdown, the U.S. could retract its expensive, unaffordable, and out-of-date empire and make its citizens safer at the same time.“
http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2009/04/10/chinas-threat-to-the-us-is-exaggerated/
2. “Liberals Line Up With Militarism
…
Joan Walsh gives us another bravura performance in a new episode of what will apparently be a very long-running show, “Deep in the Tank for Obama.”
In her latest outing, Walsh is transported near to tears by images of the president greeting soldiers during his unannounced visit to Iraq. (Yes, even though the “surge” has been “a success beyond our wildest dreams,” as Obama instructed us last year, American leaders still have to creep into the “liberated” land like a thief in the night.) In worshipful tones that one might have heard directed at the president at any point in the previous eight years from, say, National Review Online or Pajamas Media, Walsh gawps in awe at the bonding of the legions with their imperator
…
Yes, it’s somewhat amusing to watch liberal lions and lionesses mirroring the sycophancy that their partisan counterparts once lavished on Bush: an interesting, instructive foible of the political animal when it comes within the proximity of power. But it also has a far more serious, more dangerous side. The mainstream liberal acquiescence in Obama’s Terror War “continuity” removes one of the few remaining bulwarks to the corrosive, witless and ultimately suicidal militarism that plagues us. It helps smooth the way for more disasters: more war, more hatred, more corruption, more tyranny, more pointless suffering, ruin, poverty and death.
To paraphrase their own paladin, it’s time for liberals and progressives to “start putting more responsibility” on themselves, to see more clearly the reality in front of them — just as they always urged the blind followers of the last wielder of imperial power to do — and acknowledge the horrific consequences of the policies they are now so mindlessly and emotionally supporting.”
3. “Obama Follows Bush Policy on Detainee Access to Courts
Holding such proceedings would force the military to reveal details about the “the place of capture” and the “identity of U.S. or foreign forces or entities” that conducted the operation, the appeal said. It added that keeping records on such matters and litigating the cases would divert U.S. forces from their counterterrorism missions.
Tina Foster, an attorney for the International Justice Network, which represents the three Bagram detainees at the center of the case, said she found it surprising that the administration was still clinging to the Bush policy that it could capture chosen suspects in foreign countries and hold them indefinitely overseas without justifying its decisions.
“I really thought Obama meant it when he said this is going to be the end of an overreaching executive who asserted he had the power to take people and lock them up and throw away the key, no matter whether they’ve done anything or not,” Foster said. “It’s absolutely ridiculous that we should wait until the administration decides [on its policy] until we give three people who have been sitting in prison for six years the right to say, ‘I’m being held without any basis.’ ”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041003269_pf.html
4. “The Obama DOJ is now squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions. Leave aside for the moment the issue of whether you believe that the U.S. Government should have the right to abduct people anywhere in the world, ship them to faraway prisons and hold them there indefinitely without charges or any rights at all. The Bush DOJ — and now the Obama DOJ — maintain the President does and should have that right, and that’s an issue that has been extensively debated. It was, after all, one of the centerpieces of the Bush regime of radicalism, lawlessness and extremism.
…
So that Barack Obama — the one trying to convince Democrats to make him their nominee and then their President — said that abducting people and imprisoning them without charges was (a) un-American; (b) tyrannical; (c) unnecessary to fight Terrorism; (d) a potent means for stoking anti-Americanism and fueling Terrorism; (e) a means of endangering captured American troops, Americans traveling abroad and Americans generally; and (f) a violent betrayal of core, centuries-old Western principles of justice. But today’s Barack Obama, safely ensconced in the White House, fights tooth and nail to preserve his power to do exactly that.
I’m not searching for ways to criticize Obama. I wish I could be writing paeans celebrating the restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law. But these actions — these contradictions between what he said and what he is doing, the embrace of the very powers that caused so much anger towards Bush/Cheney — are so blatant, so transparent, so extreme, that the only way to avoid noticing them is to purposely shut your eyes as tightly as possible and resolve that you don’t want to see it, or that you’re so convinced of his intrinsic Goodness that you’ll just believe that even when it seems like he’s doing bad things, he must really be doing them for the Good. If there was any unanimous progressive consensus over the last eight years, it was that the President does not have the power to kidnap people, ship them far away, and then imprison them indefinitely in a cage without due process. Has that progressive consensus changed as of January 20, 2009? I think we’re going to find out.
…
One of the things I always found so striking about debates over Bush/Cheney executive power abuses was that Bush followers who admittedly had no substantive arguments to justify those actions would nonetheless still find reasons to defend their admired leader: Bush knows more than we do and probably has secret reasons for doing it. Bush is a good person and well-motivated and there’s no reason to think he’s doing bad or abusive things. Rights for Terrorists pale in comparsion to other more important issues. Republican critics of Bush are hysterics and paranoids who are only criticizing him because they want to get on TV and sell books.
As of January 20, 2009, one no longer finds those claims at National Review, Weekly Standard, right-wing blogs and the like, but instead, finds them commonly expressed in Obama-defending venues and some liberal blogs. Scan the comment section to John Cole’s post criticizing Obama’s Bagram position to see how frequently this mindset is now expressed to justify whatever Obama does
…
To recap: Obama files a brief saying he agrees in full with the Bush/Cheney position. He’s arguing that the President has the power to abduct, transport and imprison people in Bagram indefinitely with no charges of any kind. He’s telling courts that they have no authority to “second-guess” his decisions when it comes to war powers. But this is all totally different than what Bush did, and anyone who says otherwise is a reckless, ill-motivated hysteric who just wants to sell books and get on TV.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
